Slide shows have historically been a popular way to view images. This has been true of film images and it is still true of digital images. With respect to digital images, there are many ways to create a slide show from one or more digital images.
For example, one straightforward way is to allow an image viewer program to access a folder of digital images that are stored for use by a computer or other electronic device. The image viewer program can then open and display, on a display device, each of the digital images in the folder. A drawback to this method is that the presentation will be bland and unpersonalized, with images simply displayed “as is” without meaningful zooming or panning. Yet another way is to use an automated slide show generation program which also automatically determines “salient” content in the digital images, and then displays these “salient” portions of the images in a slide show. This may allow some zooming or panning with respect to image content, but there is no guarantee that the image content deemed as “salient” will have any personal significance to a viewer. Thus, in either of these methods images will typically be displayed for viewing without accentuating image content in a way that has personal significance to the viewer.
Presently, if a user wants to truly personalize a slide show, it takes a good deal of time, effort, and experience with a graphics utility or image viewing utility to format an image or images in a manner desired for display in a slide show. Typically, a variety of menus and editing windows will be used to accomplish this form of manual generation of a slide show. No matter how proficient a person is, this is not a very natural process of interacting with an image.
Furthermore, though this manual method gives a very personalized result, it is time consuming and typically requires editing of the image content, such as by cropping images. A drawback of editing an image is that when an image is edited, the original image is either permanently altered or else storage space is used to store each altered copy of the image for each slide show that the image appears in. Thus, for example, when several members of a family, generate separate personalized slide shows from a group of images, a significant amount of storage space may be consumed to store each personalized slide show. This can quickly consume limited storage space on a device that the slide show is stored upon.
With the rapid rise in use of digital cameras and powerful viewing devices such as personal computers, the need to display digital images in an attractive manner is becoming increasingly prevalent. Slide shows are one way to display digital images and satisfy this need. However, as described, current methods for creating slide shows from digital images either lack personalization, or else have several drawbacks such as requiring a great deal of time, effort, training, or extra storage capacity for storing each personalized slide show.
The drawings referred to in this description should not be understood as being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.